Category Archive: Fiction
Daisy Jones and The Six (by Taylor Jenkins Reid)
Cobalt Blue Eyes? Call the Doctor.
Daisy Jones and the Six is a fictional 1970s Fleetwood Mac style-ensemble fronted by a bewitching, raspy voiced woman (the eponymous Daisy) and a handsome, brooding guitarist-singer. The number is made up by a less ravishing woman on keyboards and a couple of other people not worth bothering about. Don’t bother reading Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel either, just wait a while and you can watch it. The front cover declares deliriously that Renaissance Woman Reese Witherspoon “devoured” this book in a day, and you can bet that she’s put it on her shelf marked Miniseries? Netflix? Role for Ava? We…
Continue Reading →The Light and The Dark (C P Snow)
"Can't we simply make them Welsh by statute?" "Who?" "The Jews."
(1947) Roy Calvert has a light, quick, graceful stride. He is over middle height, slightly built but strong, upright and slender, full of ease and grace. His eyes glint a clear transparent hazel yellow and his expression is mischievous and grave when it is not sad, grave, stricken and haunted by a wild melancholy. His voice is clear, light and reedy. His smile is intimate and kind, or it might be demure and secretive*. His is a style of extreme elegance and ease, he hits a cricket ball with statuesque grace and measured power. He is young, gifted and high-spirited….
Continue Reading →The Aerodrome
(by Rex Warner) (1941) Prima facie, this is a poor book: clunkily written, slurpily edited, wildly uneven, as devoid of depth in characters or the forces moving them as any book can be. And yet, it has something; it tackles the great theme of the 20th Century, and beyond – totalitarian cohesion and ‘cleanliness’ vs the chaos and mud of ‘normal’ humanity. And the dry, deadpan way in which high tragedy and low comedy are presented here seem in a screwy authentic way to mirror the keep-calm-and-carry-on fashion of the time in which it was written. Roy (i.e. Rex) is…
Continue Reading →Seiobo There Below (Laszlo Krasznahorkai)
Rublev's 'Troika"
Whereas Krasznahorkai’s The Melancholy of Resistance is a profound and hilarious whole, Seiobo There Below is a profound and melancholic collection of vignettes. Each of the 17 short fiction pieces (numbered on the Contents page according to the Fibonacci sequence*) captures the inexpressible numinosity of artistic creation, the quality that lies just beyond our ken. Krasznahorkai contemplates the ineffable in a heron’s stillness, the impossibility of comprehending the Acropolis, the ritualistic carving of a theatre mask, the never-resting practise of Noh, the magnificence of the Venus de Milo. A man’s insanity becomes manifest upon a viewing of Rublev’s Troika (or is it…
Continue Reading →D. H. Lawrence
Born 11 September 1885 ‘There was very little about Lawrence that wasn’t irritating to someone. Edmund Wilson…thought him “ill-bred and hysterical…One saw that he belonged to an inferior caste – some bred-down unripening race of the collieries. Against this inferiority – fundamental and physical-he must have had to fight all his life: his passionate spirit made up for it by exaggerated self-assertion.“‘* Lawrence’s books evoked similar reactions. One critic lumped him in with novelists “who appear to have passed their prime long before reaching it.”* (Note that your correspondent once wrote a high school essay asserting that there was no…
Continue Reading →